NEW YORK (Reuters) - The lives of 22,000 patients could have been saved if U.S. regulators had been quicker to remove a Bayer AG drug used to stem bleeding during open heart surgery, according to a medical researcher interviewed by CBS Television's 60 Minutes program.

The drug Trasylol was withdrawn in November at the request of the FDA after an observational study linked the medicine to kidney failure requiring dialysis and increased death of those patients.

It had been given to as many as a third of all heart bypass patients in the United States at the height of its use over a period of many years, according to the report.

Dr. Dennis Mangano, the study's researcher, said during the program that 22,000 lives could have been saved if Trasylol had been taken off the market when he first published his study in January 2006, according to a CBS News report on its Web site ahead of a broadcast slated for next Sunday.

TEL AVIV (MarketWatch) -- The U.S. Department of Agriculture ordered the largest meat recall in U.S. history on Sunday -- 143 million pounds -- after the agency's food-safety unit found raw, fresh and frozen beef sold by a California producer was unfit for consumption.

The company in question, Hallmark/Westland Meat Packing Co. of Chino, Calif., was accused of animal cruelty by the Humane Society of the U.S. An investigation by the group found the company processed cows that were too sick or injured to walk, in violation of the agriculture department's rules.

Ron Vogel, an executive with the Food and Nutrition Service, said on a conference call transcribed on the agriculture department's Web site that almost all the meat has been consumed.